Autotrophic Folly

"The term deep state originated in Turkey." -- a paraphrase from Sennott's reporting.

Granta Magazine is of singular distinction only due to the fact that I've supported it solely as a subscriber. In the nineties I was intimated by its quality, more like a quarterly collection than a periodical, and the sisters who founded Glimmer Train imitate the Granta brand, but imitate it like a Tiffany lamp knock off. The Glimmer Train sisters have rejected me, though be it rarely, and this is fine. Glimmer Train is not my favorite project. Granta used to be; I am less enamored of its voice, less intimidated, even irked by its contributor narcissism, I've become selective, more easily led to perceive flaws, than I was in the past. I do not kid myself. Certain bylines still matter, and Granta's would, but nothing I have is that piece. I am not going to write about my mother's death in that sonorous Granta fashion. Pushing the envelope in a manuscript about wiping out Philadelphia's disability activists? Maybe, but this is speculative, dependent upon my control, brimming with the ironic undercurrent particular to Granta's voice, and selecting the right word that leads to the singular and pleasing sense of pretense. I cannot lose it to raw aggression, in other words.

Let's indulge in speculation and say I get in by next year. I had to move past the half century mark to realize even a Granta byline changes nil, paid or otherwise, at this point. If I was still in my thirties it might have landed me a position under which I could manage my debt, but not now. The only time this public housing shanty guarantees me relative undisturbed peace to work is between two and six am. The internet is of course somewhat to blame for my fall in productivity, but before I opened a blog account, that drop in productivity is mainly due to nearly continuous conflict with Presby. Sure, it is amusing, but not when you have no other options, and managers, whether white and shrill, or black and liars through their teeth, have the power to limit the circumference of your daily routine to a 24 hour care facility. I can no longer rely on family to take me in. I transferred to Riverside against my will in 1994, and faced continuous harassment by the other tenants until I threatened the current manager, Trudy Richardson, with legal action. It is Trudy, and her "former OVR employee" Debra Horne, who took what traumatized me in the inner city, and made me nearly irreversibly biased against urban African American culture, and I know if I cannot get away from section 202 housing, then I really will sicken, lose to aggression, vitriol mitigated by chemical saturation and its side effects. I can get on another transfer list, sure, back to bad neighborhoods, weakened further still by waiting who knows how many years, and I can't take this anymore, except I have to take it, unless by a miracle I can hire myself away full time and sustain it.

4:30 this morning saw me take two plus hours to make a submission to the same old literary journal circuit, just to keep myself active, and this is a sink back to the excruciating poverty of my twenties. If I sink back into this fox hole, the quick sand of indigence before my social services career, then it is essentially over. It doesn't bear repeating who and what I have to thank for that, but at my age, the emerging exposure contributor's copy catch all might as well be the joke of a real world Truman Show character defeated by post production realism.